Most people assume that vision screenings are enough to tell them if they have serious eye issues. Vision screenings are not a substitute for eye exams because even though they can help tell if you have serious vision issues, they cannot help detect eye conditions and vision issues that usually do not have any symptoms. In addition to helping detect vision problems, eye exams can also help detect and diagnose other serious health issues.
Eye Exams Can Remove Barriers to Education
Learning inside and outside a classroom requires good vision, at least in most schools. Vision is becoming even more important as education increasingly incorporates technology that depends on screens and other visual devices.
An eye exam can help ensure that a child is seeing clearly and that they are comfortable in a classroom setting and that they are not being left behind. It is also a great way to ensure children participate fully in other activities and sports. Diminished access to education and social interactions are problems that can be solved by detecting, diagnosing, and treating eye problems in children.
Assessing the Impact of Medications on Health
If you have been taking certain medications for a long time, you might not know the effects these medications could be having on your body. An eye exam will assess whether these medications are affecting your eye health. Eye exams can also tell if medications are causing serious issues with your kidneys and liver. These are potentially serious problems that can be caught early if everyone went for regular eye exams.
Detecting Serious Health Problems
The eye is the only place in the body where a doctor can observe your nerves and blood vessels. Because of this, the best eye exams can be used in the detection of serious diseases including cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and many others.
These diseases are easily detected in the eye because they cause changes to your blood vessels, including those in the eye. The condition of the blood vessels in your retina is a good indication of the cognition of the blood vessels in the rest of the body. Doctors can also observe signs of vision loss caused by conditions such as diabetes, making eye exams an important diagnostic tool for these conditions.
For cancer screenings, tumors can be seen in the retina, the optic nerve, the iris, and the layer lying behind the retina (the choroid). Serious cancers such as melanoma can be observed in the choroid.
Detection of Eye Diseases
The best eye exams include looking for signs of the many diseases that impact vision. These include cataracts, dry eyes, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. All of these diseases are so serious because they all lead to loss of vision, which impacts quality of life and daily living in lots of different ways.
Regular eye exams can make a huge difference in our lives. By allowing for the early detection of eye diseases, they give doctors enough time to treat them and correct any issues they cause. Eye exams can also be an important tool in the detection and diagnosis of a myriad of other diseases.